Moscow has been characterized by unusual weather in terms of not only the cold, but also of abundant rainfall and a chronic lack of sunshine. This is setting the stage for climate sickness, not only from cold damp conditions but from increasing vitamin D deficiencies that eventually leads to many disease conditions

Muscovites shivered through their coldest August in recorded history. Furthermore, daily all-time low temperature records are continuing to fall across the Russian Federation, joining the myriad of record lows already set in 2019. (This essay is divided into two sections. First is current climate realities. Second is about cold climate sickness.)

The coldest August in record-books stretching back over 150 years is currently gripping the city, with an average air temperature of just 12C (53.6F) -some 6C below the norm. Moscow's previous coldest August was way back in 1884, when the average air temperature for the month was 4C below the norm. In the northeast of the Central District, the temperature dropped below freezing. In Sharya, in the north of the Kostroma region, the air cooled to -3 degrees, and in the grassland the temperature dropped to -7 degrees at the end of August.

Setting the Stage for Climate Sickness

Moscow has been characterized by unusual weather in terms of not only the cold, but also of abundant rainfall and a chronic lack of sunshine. This is setting the stage for climate sickness, not only from cold damp conditions but from increasing vitamin D deficiencies that eventually leads to many disease conditions including cancer.

Doctors need to start preparing their minds and practices to receive patients suffering from cold climate sickness. It is not just Moscow and Russia that is suffering from cold climate change. The National Weather Service reported a winter storm in Alaska on the 20th of August. "Long-range models are indicating cooler than normal temps for the end of Aug/start of Sept," says Minnesota meteorologist Tom Clements.

Comment: For those who can do so safely, gradually adapting the body to colder temperatures might be a good plan:

Children at Oxford's newest school are only allowed to eat vegetarian lunches and are banned from bringing in their own food.

The policies at The Swan School in Summertown were criticised by a parent, who said her daughter 'came home hungry' after the academy opened on Monday.

In what is thought to be a first for an Oxford state school, the new secondary has a completely vegetarian canteen and pupils have no alternative but to eat the hot meal on offer, although there are a couple of meat or fish options available for snacks during break time.

Comment: By pulling a move like this, the Swan school kills many birds with one stone: They decrease food costs by serving cheap hyper-processed vegetable proteins instead of pricier meat (likely the major weight behind the impetus), they align themselves with current and trendy virtue-signalling propaganda, and they enforce behavior modification in the students, setting them up for a long line of authoritarianism they can expect in their future. It's wins all around (except for the malnourished kids).

If biology has an Indiana Jones, it is Christopher Ramsden: he specializes in excavating lost studies, particularly those with the potential to challenge mainstream, government-sanctioned health advice.

His latest excavation — made possible by the pack-rat habits of a deceased scientist, the help of the scientist's sons, and computer technicians who turned punch cards and magnetic tape into formats readable by today's computers — undercuts a pillar of nutrition science.

Ramsden, of the National Institutes of Health, unearthed raw data from a 40-year-old study, which challenges the dogma that eating vegetable fats instead of animal fats is good for the heart. The study, the largest gold-standard experiment testing that idea, found the opposite, Ramsden and his colleagues reported on Tuesday in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).

Although the study is more than just another entry in the long-running nutrition wars — it is more rigorous than the vast majority of research on the topic — Ramsden makes no claims that it settles the question. Instead, he said, his discovery and analysis of long-lost data underline how the failure to publish the results of clinical trials can undermine truth.

According to a new report on patients in Illinois and Wisconsin who experienced severe respiratory illnesses after vaping, 83 percent admitted using black-market cannabis products. While 17 percent said they had used nicotine only, some of them may have been reluctant to admit using illegal drugs, and it's not clear that any of them were using standard e-cigarettes.

These findings cast further doubt on the wisdom of general warnings about "vaping" and "e-cigarettes," which imply that legal nicotine products are implicated in these cases. Such warnings may encourage former smokers who are now vaping to start smoking again, a decision that exposes them to much greater health risks.

The new study, reported Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine, focused on 53 patients who had vaped within 90 days of their symptoms, typically within the previous week. Their median age was 19, and nearly a third were younger than 18. Among the 41 patients who were "extensively interviewed," 80 percent reported using THC products, 7 percent mentioned CBD products, and 17 percent said they had vaped nicotine only. The authors note that "information on product use is based on reports by the patients, and patients may be reluctant to report illicit drug use."

What you are about to read in this article is likely to make you very angry. Once upon a time, the primary mission of our hospitals was to help people, but today they have become vicious financial predators. Many Americans try very hard to avoid visiting the hospital because of what it might cost, but if an emergency happens there is no choice. They often get us when we are at our most vulnerable, and they never explain to us in advance how much their services will actually cost. And then eventually when the bills start arriving we discover that they have charged us 30 dollars for a single aspirin or "$2,000 for a $20 feeding tube". It is a giant scam, but they have been getting away with it for decades, and so they just keep on doing it. And many hospitals go after those that are not able to pay their ridiculous bills extremely aggressively. Just consider the following example which comes to us from USA Today...

Heather Waldron and John Hawley are losing their four-bedroom house in the hills above Blacksburg, Virginia. A teenage daughter, one of their five children, sold her clothes for spending money. They worried about paying the electric bill. Financial disaster, they said, contributed to their divorce, finalized in April.

Their money problems began when the University of Virginia Health System pursued the couple with a lawsuit and a lien on their home to recoup $164,000 in charges for Waldron's emergency surgery in 2017.

I can't imagine any surgery that should ever cost $164,000. You can buy an entire house for that amount of money. It is highway robbery, and those that are engaged in this sort of predatory pricing are literally crooks.

Biologists at Keele University and the University of Sussex found aluminium contamination in bumblebee pupae at levels that would cause brain damage in humans. The insects have been found to not avoid flowers that are contaminated with aluminium when foraging for nectar, like in the photograph of a bumblebee above

Bees may be declining because they are suffering dementia compared to Alzheimer's caused by eating large amounts of aluminium.

A scientific study found high amounts of aluminium contamination in bees at levels that would cause brain damage in humans.

Bees rely on their tiny brains to navigate to flowers to collect pollen and nectar to eat.

The City of Montreal announced on Thursday that it will ban the use of the pesticide glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup.

Mayor Valérie Plante tweeted Thursday morning, "Our administration is taking a new, strong environmental step to protect the health of Montrealers. We are banning the use of a major agricultural pesticide, glyphosate, on our territory."

Glyphosate is a herbicide and crop drying agent used in the retail product Roundup, which is available at stores such as Réno-Dépôt and The Home Depot.

Comment: Nice to see Montreal taking matters into its own hands, even if Health Canada is firmly in the pocket of Monsanto/Bayer.

Scientists have shown for the first time a link between two types of heart problems and one of the most commonly prescribed classes of antibiotics.

In a study published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in partnership with the Provincial Health Services Authority's (PHSA) Therapeutic Evaluation Unit found that current users of fluoroquinolone antibiotics, such as Ciprofloxacin or Cipro, face a 2.4 times greater risk of developing aortic and mitral regurgitation, where the blood backflows into the heart, compared to patients who take amoxicillin, a different type of antibiotic. The greatest risk is within 30 days of use.

Recent studies have also linked the same class of antibiotics to other heart problems.

Some physicians favour fluoroquinolones over other antibiotics for their broad spectrum of antibacterial activity and high oral absorption, which is as effective as intravenous, or IV, treatment.

"You can send patients home with a once-a-day pill," said Mahyar Etminan, lead author and associate professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences in the faculty of medicine at UBC. "This class of antibiotics is very convenient, but for the majority of cases, especially community-related infections, they're not really needed. The inappropriate prescribing may cause both antibiotic resistance as well as serious heart problems."

A multinational team of scientists have made a startling, world-first discovery in Russia which could change the lives of tens of millions of people: they accidentally identified a mechanism to neutralize the HIV virus.

Originally, the team of Russian, Swiss, British, American and Finnish scientists was developing polysulfur heterocycles to tackle cancer when they suddenly realized the implications of the drug's mechanism were much bigger than anticipated.

"From the very beginning, the most promising direction of the study seemed to us to study the anticancer activity of this class of compounds, but it unexpectedly turned out that such compounds can also have high and selective activity against feline immunodeficiency virus, which is the closest analogue of the human immunodeficiency virus," Rakitin said.

A press release from South Ural State University (SUSU) claims the discovery could pave the way for a whole new class of antiviral drugs which could be used for numerous diseases.

In the grips of his alcohol addiction, David Reichmann was told by his doctor that he would be dead within a year.

"I'd suffered two minor strokes, but it didn't stop me from going to hotels every night and drinking until stumps. Then I'd take a bottle of bourbon home with me," the 53-year-old Victorian father of two said.

He would keep a bottle of whiskey next to his bed, but if he couldn't afford spirits that week, he'd mix methylated spirits with soft drink.

"I couldn't keep down a morning coffee," he said. "I'd have to have alcohol to settle me for the day."

Alcohol causes the most overall harm to the Australian community, surpassing crystal methamphetamine (ice) and heroin, a new national study suggests.

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.